The first would be a pair I bought for $3 at a garage sale. Nineteen-forties, pointy toe, with a bow. Still in the original shoe box.

“Love” is too strong of a word. That’s what I’ve been ruminating on now for days. It’s embarrassing to admit to love a thing when people are sick, the war rages, buying power drops, gas prices rise, the Pope blesses, spring blows in.

Isn’t this what’s wrong with the world? We love our things too much.

Last night my daughter was searching in her chest of drawers for a shirt and pair of pants to wear to Spirit Day today at school. She was to dress all in white. I half anticipated that she’d come to me in a panic — I don’t have white pants!! — insisting we run to Target to get some.

I rehearsed in my head the talk I’d deliver. You want to spend money on a pair of white pants that you can wear one day while people are dying, families don’t have enough food…and on and on.

She appeared a few minutes later with a white tee and a pair of brown pants from last summer. Turns out she has more depth than I gave her credit for. I’m the one wedded to my things.
I bought this pair of shoes two years ago in a San Francisco boutique, the kind of store where it’s not unusual for the salespeople to talk to eachother, as if you’re not there, during the entire course of a fitting. The shoes were regularly $200, on sale half-off. They were tight, but I knew the leather would stretch eventually.

I don’t buy shoes lightly. The last pair I bought is a European brand, normally expensive, that I found at TJ Maxx for less than $30. That was an exception. My spine doesn’t love poorly-shod feet.

Shoes aren’t the only objects I admire. I love lamps. I own more tables than anyone I know — I just gave away two. Furniture is like art to me. I have an enamel chair that sits unused against a wall. It reminds me of easel and painting rolled into one.

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, with his “Ode to things,” gave me permission to embrace my own love of things. As I read of “shapely shoes” and “the softness of a woman’s hip,” I knew my appreciation for things was different from greed or desire. It is love for beauty.

Ode to thingsby Pablo Neruda
I have a crazy,
crazy love of things.
I like pliers,
and scissors.
I love
cups,
rings,
and bowls —
not to speak, of course,
of hats.
I love all things,
not just the grandest,
also the infinite-
ly
small —
thimbles,
spurs,
plates,
and flower vases.
Oh yes,
the planet
is sublime!
It’s full of
pipes
weaving
hand-held
through tobacco smoke,
and keys
and salt shakers —
everything,
I mean,
that is made
by the hand of man, every little thing:
shapely shoes,
and fabric,
and each new
bloodless birth
of gold,
eyeglasses,
carpenter’s nails,
brushes,
clocks, compasses,
coins, and the so-soft
softness of chairs.
Mankind has
built
oh so many
perfect
things!
Built them of wool
and of wood,
of glass and
of rope:
remarkable
tables,
ships, and stairways.
I love
all
things,
not because they are
passionate
or sweet-smelling
but because,
I don’t know,
because
this ocean is yours,
and mine:
these buttons
and wheels
and little
forgotten
treasures,
fans upon
whose feathers
love has scattered
its blossoms,
glasses, knives and
scissors —
all bear
the trace
of someone’s fingers
on their handle or surface,
the trace of a distant hand
lost
in the depths of forgetfulness.
I pause in houses,
streets and
elevators,
touching things,
identifying objects
that I secretly covet:
this one because it rings,
that one because
it’s as soft
as the softness of a woman’s hip,
that one there for its deep-sea color,
and that one for its velvet feel.
O irrevocable
river
of things:
no one can say
that I loved
only
fish,
or the plants of the jungle and the field,
that I loved
only
those things that leap and climb, desire, and survive.
It’s not true:
many things conspired
to tell me the whole story.
Not only did they touch me,
or my hand touched them:
they were
so close
that they were a part
of my being,
they were so alive with me
that they lived half my life
and will die half my death.

Pablo Neruda wrote three books of odes during his lifetime. “Oda a las cosas” appeared in the book Odas Elementales in 1954. Neruda wrote and published a vast number of poems, which spoke of love, existentialism, and political travesty. His odes — poems of praise to laziness, a tuna, things — celebrated the day-to-day — the simple ordinariness of life itself.

Jim went to the Taos Solar Music Festival for the weekend; I stayed behind with the girls. I needed to get us ready for a week-long trip of our own. Besides, I enjoy time with them alone. We ate soupy spaghetti for dinner, and they slept with me. I woke up throughout the night, although nothing to do with them. We kept the window open, and all night I heard a bullfrog outside, his lonely vibrating call floating in and out of my dreams.

The last time Jim was gone I did the Pablo Neruda reading. I was relieved Jim couldn’t come see me read. One glimpse of him in the audience and I would have been struck by “inappropriate giggling syndrome.” As it was, when Christopher, one of the male performers, and I read the early love poem “Juegas Todos Los Días,” he had a smile on his face that looked like he was about to lose it, so I kept my eyes on the page or the audience from that point on to avoid cracking up.

I read “Solo La Muerte” with a woman named Enid; we wore black shawls and sat with straight spines in our chairs. The words came out in eerie monotone from somewhere deep inside. Later, someone in the audience asked us each which was our favorite poem from those we read. I told her mine was “La Muerte.” “Me, too,” she said.

We covered Neruda’s life from his early, tortured love to his exploration of existentialism, then political activism, mature love, and, finally, acceptance of death. A woman left agitated at intermission and we wondered if she was offended by the political nature of the poems. Each of us who read Neruda’s political works did so with passion. It was cleansing in many ways to assume Neruda’s fury at the corrupt governments and corporations of his time; doing so was an outlet for our own, current discontent.

It’s Sunday night; I’m preparing this post to publish tomorrow. I wish I would have written up something when it was fresh. Yet, it’s taken me weeks to let Neruda sink in. His voice (I tried to find a recording but couldn’t get one that worked) is haunting. I feel haunted, truly, but rather than him haunting me, I feel like I’ve crept into him somehow and am swirling about, sniffing him out for something I’ve forgotten to take away.

And now, I hear the sound of Jim’s Harley. He’s back from Taos. It’s always good when he’s been delivered home safe after a long ride.

It Is Born by Pablo NerudaHere I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.

This Wednesday is our dramatic reading of Pablo Neruda poetry. All day I walk around the house reciting the poems, stumbling over words in Spanish. I have to say them over and over, first to learn to enunciate each word, then to hear the rhythm of the words together, finally to understand their meaning.

Our performance follows the chronology of Neruda’s life in poems. We start with his early love poems, published in 1923 (when Neruda was only 20 years old!) in a collection called Veinte Poemas de Amor. Many years later, Neruda said this:

Veinte Poemas de Amor make a painful book of pastoral poems filled with my most tormented adolescent passions. It is a book I love because, in spite of its acute melancholy, the joyfulness of being alive is present in it…I wrote in a long, slender-bodied abandoned lifeboat left over from some shipwreck. The sky overhead was the most violent blue I have ever seen. I don’t think I have ever again been so exalted.

Next we cover poems Neruda wrote while serving a series of honorary consulships that took him to East Asia, Europe, and throughout South America. Neruda wrote Solo La Muerte during this time. Of all the poems we’ll be covering on Wednesday, Solo La Muerte is my favorite.

The first time I read it in rehearsal, I couldn’t get the emphasis right on certain syllables in the many words I rarely used. The director told me to practice, to say the poem 17 times out loud if I had to. Now the verses roll out in a deep, ethereal voice. I wonder how could Neruda at such a young age have known death so well? Then I read this quote and everything makes sense.

I had only solitude open to me. That time was the loneliest in my life. Yet I also recall it as the most luminous, as if a lightning flash of extraordinary brightness had stopped at my window to throw light on my destiny. My work progressed very slowly. Distance and a deep silence separated me from my world, and I could not bring myself to enter wholeheartedly into the alien world around me. If the very air he breathes does not enter into the poet, his poem is dead: dead because it has not had a chance to breathe.

I read somewhere recently that Neruda is often thought of as either a poet of love or a poet of politics. I thought I knew him as both, but I realize now I never really knew him. What I know now is his political poems transform me. I nearly spit the names of dictators (“the dictatorship of flies”) he ticks off in his poem La United Fruit Co.:

Neruda’s political fire, it’s said, was started with the Spanish Civil War and the murder of García Lorca. Neruda operated inside and outside the political system. He was elected senator of the Republic, he joined the Communist party of Chile, he protested on behalf of striking miners and for a time lived in exile. I read the following quote and it ignites in me this question: Who are today’s “Pablo Nerudas”?

Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread. Arsonists, warmongers, wolves hunt down the poet to burn, kill, sink their teeth into him. The Spanish Fascists started off the war in Spain by assassinating its greatest poet. But poetry has not died; it has a cat’s nine lives. They harass it, they drag it through the street, they spit on it and make it the butt of their jokes, they try to strangle it, throw it into prison, and it survives every attempt with a clear face and a smile as bright as grains of rice.

As the first bullets ripped into the guitars of Spain, when blood instead of music gushed out of them, my poetry stopped dead like a ghost in the streets. From then on, my road met everyman’s road. And suddenly I saw that from the south of solitude I had moved to the north, which is el pueblo, the people, whose sword, whose handkerchief my humble poetry wants to be, to dry the sweat of its vast sorrows and give it a weapon in the struggle for bread.

I have no answers. I’m touched by this poet in a way I never was before. I don’t pretend to know much about him still. Yet somehow, he’s getting through.

Try it. Pick a poem by someone you know is great but whose greatness, perhaps, you’ve never truly known. Read that poem out loud 17 times. Read it in an empty house. Read it until you shout it, you drone it, you channel it. Read it until it starts to become yours.

There are lone cemeteries,
tombs filled with soundless bones,
the heart passing through a tunnel
dark, dark, dark;
like a shipwreck we die inward
like smothering in our hearts,
like slowly falling from our skin to our soul.

There are corpses,
there are feet of sticky, cold gravestone,
there is death in the bones,
like a pure sound,
like a bark without a dog,
coming from certain bells, from certain tombs,
growing in the dampness like teardrops or raindrops.

I see alone, at times,
coffins with sails
weighing anchor with pale corpses, with dead-tressed women,
with bakers white as angels,
with pensive girls married to notaries;
coffins going up the vertical river of the dead,
the dark purple river,
upward, with the sails swollen by the sound
of death,
swollen by the silent sound of death.

To resonance comes death
like a shoe without a foot, like a suit without a man,
she comes to knock with a stoneless and fingerless ring,
she comes to shout without mouth, without tongue,
without throat.
Yet her steps sound
and her dress sounds, silent as a tree.

I know little, I am not well acquainted, I can scarcely see,
but I think that her song has the color of moist violets,
of violets accustomed to the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the gaze of death is green,
with the sharp dampness of a violet
and its dark color of exasperated winter.

But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
she licks the ground looking for corpses,
death is in the broom,
it is death’s tongue looking for dead bodies,
it is death’s needle looking for thread.

Death is in the cots:
in the slow mattresses, in the black blankets
she lives stretched out, and she suddenly blows:
she blows a dark sound that puffs out the sheets,
and there are beds sailing to a port
where she is waiting, dressed as an admiral.Solo la muerte was first published in Residencia de la Tierra (1933); Translation from Neruda: Selected Poems, Ed. Nathaniel Tarn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970.

I run after certain words… I catch them in mid-air, as they buzz past; I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives… And I stir them; I shake them; I drink them; I gulp them down; I mash them; I garnish them; I let them go…

I got a call on Friday asking if I would be one of seven bilingual speakers to present dramatic readings of Pablo Neruda poetry and views of his political life. “Si, como no,” I said (although afterwards I worried that “dramatic readings” were a second cousin to slam, which, as I’ve noted before, I don’t do).

The readings will take place in mid-June. I’ll receive the poems and scripts soon and can begin working on them and meeting with the director of the production as well as the other readers. Tengo un poco miedo now that I’ve signed up to do this. Too bad I can’t read them in Spanglish.

I have to admit, I’m not particularly smart when it comes to Neruda. My first truly serious boyfriend, someone I lived with for five years and considered marrying, gave me a collection of poems by Neruda. I don’t recall Neruda’s poems as much as I remember the significance of a man givingme Neruda poems. It was the first time I was in love. Everything was a sign.

I remember the two of us, me and my boyfriend, sitting on the edge of Albuquerque’s west mesa desert where it overlooked a canyon. There were old cars at the bottom that looked like they’d been pushed over the edge. Washing machines and refrigerators, too. The kind of place where someone could dispose of a body and get away with it. The clouds were forming into figures; we were stoned. “There goes a moose,” I said, “can you see the antlers?” “Yes,” he cried. He saw everything I saw, and I honestly thought that was what people meant when they talked about true love.

Then the clouds turned dark and before you knew it we were caught in one of those New Mexico thunderstorms that scares you to death, where you think you’re going to get hit by lightning because there’s nothing out there taller than you. And in that way your mind can play tricks when you’re stoned, I believed the clouds were angry imps telling me this relationship was doomed. One minute perfect, the next doomed.

The relationship ended, not because of that episode or anything in particular except for the fact I was completely afloat during that time in my life. I was always looking for what things meant. That he gave me a collection of poems foretold a sort of soulmate union, which thunderheads later told me to end. I never revisited Neruda after the relationship ended. I took off to Spain to find myself and for over a decade ran into a sort of fallow period as far as it came to poetry.

This weekend I looked up Neruda on the web. The first poem I came across was the one below. Maybe I’m still stuck on signs but it sure seemed to portend something important. A kind of message about life. How books are everything yet nothing. There’s only so much you can get out of a book, it seemed to say. You have to live to write.

What do you think? What does this poem say to you? What can you tell me about Neruda that might help me prepare for my dramatic reading of his words?

Ode to the Booktranslated by Nathaniel Tarn

When I close a book
I open life.
I hear
faltering cries
among harbours.
Copper ignots
slide down sand-pits
to Tocopilla.
Night time.
Among the islands
our ocean
throbs with fish,
touches the feet, the thighs,
the chalk ribs
of my country.
The whole of night
clings to its shores, by dawn
it wakes up singing
as if it had excited a guitar.

The ocean’s surge is calling.
The wind
calls me
and Rodriguez calls,
and Jose Antonio–
I got a telegram
from the “Mine” Union
and the one I love
(whose name I won’t let out)
expects me in Bucalemu.

No book has been able
to wrap me in paper,
to fill me up
with typography,
with heavenly imprints
or was ever able
to bind my eyes,
I come out of books to people orchards
with the hoarse family of my song,
to work the burning metals
or to eat smoked beef
by mountain firesides.
I love adventurous
books,
books of forest or snow,
depth or sky
but hate
the spider book
in which thought
has laid poisonous wires
to trap the juvenile
and circling fly.
Book, let me go.
I won’t go clothed
in volumes,
I don’t come out
of collected works,
my poems
have not eaten poems–
they devour
exciting happenings,
feed on rough weather,
and dig their food
out of earth and men.
I’m on my way
with dust in my shoes
free of mythology:
send books back to their shelves,
I’m going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song.